Chapter XII: Part 12

In army language, theirs had not been a “good show.” We had heard the account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G. H. Q., where they took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic. The two battalions were set to take a trench; that was all. In the midst of merciless shell-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the teeth out of the trench. When the given moment came they swept forward. But our artillery had not “connected up” properly.

The German machine guns were not out of commission, and for them it was like working a loom playing the bullets back and forth across the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The British had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to reason why; that was the glory of the thing. Nothing more gallant in warfare than their persistence, till they found that it was like trying to swim in a cataract of lead. One officer got within fifty yards of the German parapet before he fell. At last they realised that it could not be done--later than they should, but they were a proud regiment and though they had been too brave, there was something splendid about it.

With a soldier’s winning frankness and simplicity they told what had happened. Even before they charged they knew the machine guns were in place; they knew what they had to face. One spoke of seeing, as they lay waiting, a German officer standing up in the midst of the British shell-fire.

“A stout-hearted fighter! We had to admire him!” said the adjutant.

It was a chivalrous thought with a deep appeal, considering what he had been through. Oh, these English! They will not hate; they cannot be separated from their sense of sportsmanship.

It was not the first time the guns had not “connected up” for either side, and German charges on many occasions had met a like fate. Calm enough, these officers, true to their birthright of phlegm. They did not make excuses. Success is the criterion of battle. They had failed. Their unblinking recognition of the fact was a sort of self-punishment which cut deep into your own sensitiveness. One young lieutenant could not keep his lip from trembling over that naked, grim thought. The pride of regiment had been struck a whip-blow which meant more to the soldier than any injury to his personal pride.

But next time! They wanted another try for that trench, these survivors. No matter about anything else--the battalion must have another chance. You appreciated this from a few words and more from the stubborn resolution in the bearing of all. There was no “let-us-at-’em-again” frightfulness. In order to end this war you must “lick” one side or the other, and these men were not “licked.” One was sorry that he had gone to see them. It was like lacerating a wound. One could only assure them, in his faith in their gallantry, that they would win next time. And oh, how you wanted them to win! They deserved to win because they were such manly losers.

At home in their rough wooden houses in camp we found a battalion which had won--the same undemonstrative type as the one that had lost; the same simplicity and kindly hospitality which gives life at the front a charm in the midst of its tragedy, from these men of one of the dependable line regiments. This colonel knew the other colonel, and he said about the other what his fellow-officers had said: it was not his fault; he was a good man. If the guns were not “on,” what happened to him was bound to happen to anybody. They had been “on” for the winning battalion; perfectly “on.” They had buried the machine guns and the Germans with them.

When a man goes into the kind of charge that either battalion made he gives himself up for lost. The psychology is simple. You are going to keep on until--! Well, as Mr. Atkins has remarked in his own terse way, a battle was a lot of noise all around you and suddenly a big bang in your ear; and then somebody said, “Please open your mouth and take this!” and you found yourself in a white, silent place full of cots.

The winning battalion was amazed how easily the thing was done. They had “walked in.” They were a little surprised to be alive--thanks to the guns. “Here we are! Here we are again!” as the song at the front goes. It is all a lottery. Make up your mind to draw the death number; and if you don’t, that is velvet. Army courage these days is highly sensitised steel in response to will.

They had won; there was a credit mark in the regimental record. All had won; nobody in particular, but the battalion, the lot of them. They did not boast about it. The thing just happened. They were alive and enjoying the sheer fact of life, writing letters home, re-reading letters from home, looking at the pictures in the illustrated papers, as they leaned back and smoked their briar-wood pipes and discussed politics with that freedom and directness of opinion which is an Englishman’s pastime and his birthright.

The captain who was describing the fight had retired from the army, gone into business, and returned as a reserve officer. The guns were to stop firing at a given moment. As the minute-hand lay over the figure on his wrist watch he dashed for the broken parapet, still in the haze of dust from the shell-bursts, to find not a German in sight. All were under cover. He enacted the ridiculous scene with humorous appreciation of how he came face to face with a German as he turned a traverse. He was ready with his revolver and the other was not, and the other was his prisoner.

There was nothing grewsome about listening to a diffident soldier explaining how he “bombed them out,” and you shared his amusement over the surprise of a German who stuck his head out of a dugout within a foot of the face of a British soldier, who was peeping inside to see if any more _Boches_ were at home. You rejoiced with this battalion. Victory is sweet.

When on the way back to quarters you passed some of the New Army men, “the Keetcheenaires,” as the French call them, you were reminded of how, although the war was old, the British army was young. There was a “Watch our city grow!” atmosphere about it. Little by little, some great force seems steadily pushing up from the rear. It made that business institution at G. H. Q. feel like bankers with an enormous, increasing surplus. In this the British is like no other army. One has watched it in the making.

XXV

THE MAPLE LEAF FOLK

Canadians at the front--Home folks to the American--One touch of
New York slang--Hustlers--The discipline of self-reliance--
Charging through gas--Our bond with the Canadians--Their
optimism and sentiment--The Princess Pats--Holding down the
lid of hell--The second battle of Ypres--The Story of May
Eighth--Holding a salient--The Germans prepare to attack--
The marksmen of the P. P’s--Down go the Germans--The attack
broken--Official record of the struggle--Machine guns buried--
Reinforcements and ammunition--The third and severest charge--
Seventy-five per cent. casualties--The P. P’s, “regulars”--
Modern knights.

These were home folks to the American. You might know all by their maple leaf symbol; but even before you saw that, with its bronze none too prominent against the khaki, you knew those who were not recent emigrants from England to Canada by their accent and by certain slang phrases which pay no customs duty at the border.

When, on a dark February night cruising in a slough of a road, I heard out of a wall of blackness back of the trenches, “Gee! Get onto the bus!” which referred to our car, and also, “Cut out the noise!” I was certain that I might dispense with an interpreter. After I had remarked that I came from New York, which is only across the street from Montreal as distances go in our countries, the American batting about the front at midnight was welcomed with a “glad hand” across that imaginary line which has and ever shall have no fortresses.

What a strange place to find Canadians--at the front in Europe! I could never quite accommodate myself to the wonder of a man from Winnipeg, and perhaps a “neutral” from Wyoming in his company, fighting Germans in Flanders. A man used to a downy couch and an easy-chair by the fire and steam-heated rooms, who had ten thousand a year in Toronto, when you found him in a chill, damp cellar of a peasant’s cottage in range of the enemy’s shells was getting something more novel, if not more picturesque, than dog-mushing and prospecting on the Yukon; for that contrast we are quite used to.

All I asked of the Canadians was to allow a little of the glory they had won--they had won such a lot--to rub off on their neighbours. If there must be war, and no Canadian believed in it as an institution, why, to my mind, the Canadians did a fine thing for civilisation’s sake. It hurt sometimes to think that we also could not be in the fight for the good cause, too, particularly after the _Lusitania_ was sunk, when my own feelings had lost all semblance to neutrality.

The Canadians enlivened life at the front; for they have a little more zip to them than the thoroughgoing British. Their climate spells “hustle,” and we are all the product of climate to a large degree, whether in England, on the Mississippi flatlands, or in Manitoba. Eager and highstrung the Canadian born, quick to see and act. Very restless they were when held up on Salisbury Plain, after they had come three-four-five-six thousand miles to fight and there was nothing but mud in an English winter to fight.

One from the American continent knew what ailed them; they wanted action. They may have seemed undisciplined to a drill sergeant; but the kind of discipline they needed was a sight of the real thing. They wanted to know, What for? And Lord Kitchener was kinder to them, though many were beginners, than to his own new army; he could be, as they had their guns and equipment ready. So he sent them over to France before it was too late in the spring to get frozen feet from standing in icy water looking over a parapet at a German parapet. They liked Flanders mud better than Salisbury Plain mud, because it meant that there was “something doing.”

It was in their first trenches that I first saw them, and they were “on the job, all right,” in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep of the searchlights and the flares. They had become the most ardent of pupils, for here was that real thing which steadied them and proved their metal. They refashioned their trenches and drained them with the fastidiousness of good housekeepers, who had a frontiersman’s experience for an inheritance. In a week they appeared to be old hands at the business.

“Their discipline is different from ours,” said a British general, “but it works out. They are splendid. I ask for no better troops.”

They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars, but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of “go to it” when a crisis came. This trench was only an introduction, a preparation for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot of any soldiers. It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in the second battle of Ypres when the gas fumes rolled in upon them. I should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert. All Canada knows it in detail from their own correspondents and their record officer. England will one day know about her regiments; her stubborn regiments of the line, her county regiments, who have won the admiration of all the crack regiments, whether English or Scots.

“When that gas came along,” said one Canadian, who expressed the Canadian spirit, “we knew the _Boches_ were springing a new one on us. You know how it is if a man is hit in the face by a cloud of smoke when he is going into a burning building to get somebody out. He draws back--and then he goes in. We went in. We charged--well, it was the way we felt about it. We wanted to get at them and we were boiling mad over such a dastardly kind of attack.”

Higher authorities than any civilian have testified to how that charge helped, if it did not save the situation. And then at Givenchy-- straight work into the enemy’s trenches under the guns. Canada is a part of the British Empire and a precious part; but the Canadians, all imperial politics aside, fought their way into the affections of the British army, if they did not already possess it. They made the Rocky Mountains seem more majestic and the Thousand Islands more lovely.

If there are some people in the United States busy with their own affairs who look on the Canadians as living up north somewhere toward the Arctic Circle and not very numerous, that old criterion of merit which discovers in the glare of battle’s publicity merit which already existed has given to the name Canadian a glory which can be appreciated only with the perspective of time. The Civil War left us a martial tradition; they have won theirs. Some day a few of their neutral neighbours, who fought by their side will be joining in their army reunions and remarking, “Wasn’t that mud in Flanders--” etc.

My thanks to the Canadians for being at the front. They brought me back to the plains and the Northwest, and they showed the Germans on some occasions what a blizzard is like when expressed in bullets instead of in snowflakes, by men who know how to shoot. I had continental pride in them. They had the dry, pungent philosophy and the indomitable optimism which the air of the plains and the St. Lawrence Valley seems to develop. They were not afraid to be a little emotional and sentimental. There is room for that sort of thing between Vancouver and Halifax. They had been in some “tough scraps” which they saw clear-eyed, as they would see a boxing-match or a spill from a canoe into a Canadian rapids.

As for the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, all old soldiers of the South African campaign almost without exception, knowing and hardened, their veteran experience gave them an earlier opportunity in the trenches than the first Canadian division. Brigaded with British regulars, the Princess Pats were a sort of _corps d’élite_. Colonel Francis Farquhar, known as “Fanny,” was their colonel, and he knew his men. After he was killed his spirit remained with them. Asked if they could stick, they said, “Yes, sir!” cheerily, as he would have wanted them to say it.

I am going to tell you about the work of the Princess Pats on May 8th, not to single them out from any other regiment, but because it is typical of the kind of fighting which many another regiment has known and I have it in illustrative detail. Losses, day by day losses, characteristic of trench warfare, they had previously suffered in holding a difficult salient at St. Eloi--losses that added up into the hundreds. Heretofore as one of them said, they had been holding down the lid of hell, but on May 8th they were to hold on to the edge of the opening by the skin of their teeth and look down into the bowels of hell after the Germans had blown off the lid with high explosives.

It was in a big château that I first heard the story and felt the thrill of it told by the tongues of its participants. There were twenty bedrooms in that château. If I wished to stay all night I might occupy three or four--and as for that bathroom, paradise to men who have been buried in filthy mud by high explosives, the Frenchman who planned it had the most spacious ideas in immersions. A tub or a shower or a hose as you pleased. Some bathroom, that!

For nothing in the British army was too good for the Princess Pats before May 8th; and since May 8th nothing was quite good enough. Five of us sat down to dinner in a banquet hall looking out on a private park, big enough to hold fifty. The talk ran fast.

“Too bad Gault is not here. He’s in England recovering from his wound. Gault is six feet tall and five feet of him legs. All day in that trench with a shell wound in his thigh and arm. God! How he was suffering! But not a moan--his face twitching and trying to make the twitch into a smile--and telling us to stick.”

“Buller away, too. He was the second in command. Gault succeeded him. Buller was hit on May 5th--and missed the big show--piece of shell in the eye.”

“And Charlie Stewart, who was shot through the stomach. How we miss him. If ever there were a ‘live-wire’ it’s Charlie. Up or down, he’s smiling and ready for the next adventure. Once he made thirty thousand dollars in the Yukon--and spent it on the way to Vancouver. The first job he could get was washing dishes--but he wasn’t washing them long. Again he started out in the Northwest on an expedition with four hundred traps to cut into the fur business of the Hudson’s Bay Company. His Indians got sick; he wouldn’t desert them--and before he was through he had a time which beat anything yet opened up for us by the Germans in Flanders--but you have heard such stories from the Northwest before. Being shot through the stomach the way he was all the doctors agreed that Charlie would die. It was like Charlie to disagree with them. He always has his own point of view. So he is getting well. Charlie came out to the war with the packing-case which had been used by his grandfather, who was an officer in the Crimean War. He said that it would bring him luck.”

The 4th of May was bad enough--a ghastly forerunner for the 8th. On the 4th the P. P’s, after having been under shell-fire throughout the second battle of Ypres--the “gas battle”--were ordered forward to a new line to the southeast of Ypres. To the north of Ypres the British line had been driven back by the concentration of shell-fire and the rolling, deadly march of the clouds of asphyxiating gas.

The Germans were still determined to take the town which they had showered with four million dollars’ worth of shells. It would be big news--the fall of Ypres as a prelude to the fall of Przemysl and of Lemberg. A wicked salient was produced in the British line to the southeast by the cave-in to the north. It seems to be the lot of the P. P’s to get into salients. On the 4th they lost 28 men killed and 98 wounded from a gruelling all-day shell-fire and stone-walling. That night they got relief and were out for two days, when they were back in the front trenches again. The 5th and the 6th were fairly quiet; that is, what the P. P’s or Mr. Thomas Atkins would call quiet. Average mortals wouldn’t. They would try to appear unconcerned and say they had been under pretty heavy fire--which means shells all over the place and machine guns combing the parapet. Very dull, indeed. Only three men killed and seventeen wounded.

On the night of May 7th the P. P’s had a muster of 635 men. This was a good deal less than half of the original total in the battalion, including recruits who had come out to fill the gaps caused by death, wounds and sickness. Bear in mind that before this war a force was supposed to prepare for retreat with a loss of ten per cent. and get under way to the rear with the loss of fifteen per cent., and that with the loss of thirty per cent. it was supposed to have borne all that can be expected of the best trained soldiers.

The Germans were quiet that night--suggestively quiet. At 4.30 the prelude began; by 5.30 the German gunners had fairly warmed to their work. They were using every kind of shell they had in the locker. Every signal wire the P. P’s possessed had been cut. The brigade commander could not know what was happening to them and they could not know his wishes--except that it may be taken for granted that the orders of any British brigade commander are always to “stick it.”

The shell-fire was as thick at the P. P.’s backs as in front of them. They were fenced in by shell-fire. And they were infantry taking what the guns gave in order to put them out of business so that the way would be clear for the German infantry to charge. In theory they ought to have been buried and mangled beyond the power of resistance by what is called “the artillery preparation for the infantry in attack.”

Every man of the P. P’s knew what was coming. There was relief in their hearts when they saw the Germans break from their trenches and start down the slope of the hill in front. Now they could take it out of the German infantry in payment for what the German guns were doing to them. This was their only thought. Being good shots, with the instinct of the man who is used to shooting at game, the P. P’s “shoot to kill” and at individual targets. The light green of the German uniform is more visible on the deep green background of spring grass and foliage than against the tints of autumn.

At two or three or four hundred yards no one of the marksmen of the P. P’s, and there were several said to be able to “shoot the eye off an ant,” could miss the target. As for Corporal Christy, the old bear hunter of the Northwest, he leaned out over the parapet when a charge began because he could shoot better in that position. They kept on knocking down Germans; they didn’t know that men around them were being hit; they hardly knew that they were being shelled except when a burst shook their aim or filled their eyes with dust. In that case they wiped the dust out of their eyes and went on. The first that many of them realised that the German attack was broken was when they saw green blots in front of the standing figures--which were now going in the other direction. Then the thing was to keep as many of these as possible from getting back over the hill. After that they could dress the wounded and make the dying a little more comfortable. For there was no getting the wounded to the rear. They had to remain there in the trench perhaps to be wounded again, spectators of their comrades’ valour without the preoccupation of action.

In the official war journal where a battalion keeps its records--that precious historical document which will be safeguarded in fireproof vaults one of these days--you may read in cold official language what happened in one section of the British line on the 8th of May. Thus:

“7 A. M. Fire trench on right blown in at several points.... 9 A. M. Lieutenants Martin and Triggs were hit and came out of left communicating trench with number of wounded.... Captain Still and Lieut. de Bay hit also.... 9.30 A. M. All machine guns were buried (by high explosive shells) but two were dug out and mounted again. A shell killed every man in one section.... 10.30 A.M. Lieut. Edwards was killed.... Lieutenant Crawford, who was most gallant, was severely wounded.... Captain Adamson, who had been handing out ammunition, was hit in the shoulder, but continued to work with only one arm useful.... Sergeant-Major Frazer, who was also handing out ammunition to support trenches, was killed instantly by a bullet in the head.”

At 10.30 only four officers remained fit for action. All were lieutenants. The ranking one of these was Niven, in command after Gault was wounded at 7 A. M. We have all met the Niven type anywhere from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Circle, the high-strung, wiry type, who moves about too fast to carry any loose flesh and accumulates none because he does move about so fast. A little man Niven, a rancher, a horseman, with a good education and a knowledge of men. He rather fits the old saying about licking his weight in wild cats--wild cats being nearer his size than lions or tigers.

Eight months before he had not known any more about war than thousands of other Canadians of his type, except that soldiers carried rifles over their shoulders and kept step. But he had “Fanny” Farquhar of the British army for his teacher; and he studied the book of war in the midst of shells and bullets--which means that the lessons stick in the same way as the lesson the small boy receives when he touches the red-hot end of a poker to see how it feels.

Writing in the midst of ruined trenches rocked by the concussion of shells, every message he sent that day, every report he made by orderly after the wires were down was written out very explicitly-- which Farquhar had taught him was the army way. The record is there of his coolness when the lid was blown off of hell. For all you can tell by the firm chirography he might have been sending a note to a ranch foreman.

After his communications were cut, he was not certain how much support he had on his flanks. It looked for a time as if he had none. After the first charge was repulsed he made contact with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps on his right. He knew from the nature of the first German charge that the second would be worse than the first. The Germans had advanced some machine guns; they would be able to place their increased artillery fire more accurately. Again green figures started down that hill and again they were put back. Then Niven was able to establish contact with the Shropshire Light Infantry, another regiment on his left. So he knew that right and left he was supported--and by seasoned British regulars. This was very, very comforting--especially so when German machine gun fire was not only coming from the front but in enfilade--which is so trying to a soldier’s steadiness. In other words, the P. P’s were shooting at Germans in front while bullets were whipping crosswise of their trenches and of the regulars on their flanks, too. Some of the German infantrymen who had not been hit or had not fallen back had dug themselves cover and were firing at a closer range.

The Germans had located the points in the P. P’s’ trench occupied by the machine guns. At least, they could put these hornets’ nests out of business, if not all the individual riflemen. So they concentrated high explosive shells on them. That did the trick; it buried them. But a buried machine gun may be dug out and fired again. It may be dug out two or three times and keep on firing as long as it will work and there is any one to man it.

While the machine guns were being exhumed every man in one sector of the trench was killed. Then the left half of the right fire trench got three or four shells one after another bang into it. There was no trench left: only macerated earth and mangled men. Those emerging alive were told to fall back to the communicating trench. Next the right end of the left fire trench was blown in. When the survivors fell back to the communication trench that was also blown in their face.

“Oh, but we were having a merry party,” as Lieutenant Vandenberg said.

Niven and his lieutenants were moving here and there to the point of each new explosion to ascertain the amount of the damage and to decide what was to be done as the result. One soldier described Niven’s eyes as sparks emitted from two holes in his dust-caked face.

Papineau tells how a tree outside the trench was cut in two by a shell and its trunk laid across the breach of the trench caused by another shell; and lying over the trunk limp and lifeless where he had fallen was a man killed by still another shell.

“I remember how he looked because I had to step around him and over the trunk,” said Papineau.

Unless you did have to step around a dead or wounded man there was no time to observe his appearance; for by noon there were as many dead and wounded in the P. P’s’ trench as there were men fit for action.

Those unhurt did not have to be steadied by their superiors. Knocked down by a concussion they sprang up with the promptness of disgust of one thrown off a horse or tripped by a wire. When told to move from one part of the trench to another where there was desperate need, a word was sufficient direction. They understood what was wanted of them, these veterans. They went. They seized every lull to drop the rifle for the spade and repair the breaches. When they were not shooting they were digging. The officers had only to keep reminding them not to expose themselves in the breaches. For in the thick of it--and the thicker the more so--they must try to keep some dirt between all of their bodies except the head and arm which must be up in order to fire.

At 1.30 a cheer rose from that trench. It was for a platoon of the King’s Royal Rifles which had come as reinforcement. Oh, but that band of Tommies did look good to the P. P’s! And the little prize package that the very reliable Mr. Atkins had with him--the machine gun! You can always count on Mr. Atkins to remain “among those present” to the last on such occasions.

Now Niven got word by messenger to go to the nearest point where the telephone was working and tell the brigade commander the complete details of the situation. The brigade commander asked him if he could stick, and he said “Yes, sir!” which is what Col. “Fanny” Farquhar would have said. That trip was hardly what could be called peaceful. The orderly whom Niven had with him both going and coming was hit by high explosive shells. Niven is so small--it is very difficult to hit him. He is about up to Major Gault’s shoulder.

He had been worrying about his supply of rifle cartridges. There were not enough to take care of another German infantry charge which was surely coming. After repelling two charges, think of failing to repel the third for want of ammunition! Think of Corporal Christy, the bear-hunter, with the Germans thick in front of him and no bullets for his rifle! But appeared again Mr. Thomas Atkins--another platoon of him with twenty boxes of cartridges which were rather a risky burden to bring through the shell fire. The relief as these were distributed was that of having something at your throat which threatens to strangle you removed.

Making another tour of his trenches about four in the afternoon, Niven found that there was a gap of fifty yards between his left and the right of the adjoining regiment. Fifty yards is the inch on the end of a man’s nose in trench warfare on such an occasion. He was able to place eight men in that gap. At least, they could keep a lookout and tell him what was going on.

It was not cheering news either to learn a little later that the regiments on his left had withdrawn to trenches about three hundred yards to the rear--a long distance in trench warfare. But the P. P’s had no time for retirement. They could have gone only in the panic of men who think of nothing in their demoralisation except to flee from the danger in front without thinking that there may be more danger to the rear. They were held where they were under what cover they had by the renewed blasts of shells--putting the machine guns out of action again--which suddenly ceased; for the Germans were coming on again.

Now was the supreme effort. It was as a nightmare in which only the objective of effort is recalled and all else is a vague struggle of all the strength one can exert against smothering odds. No use to ask these men what they thought. What do you think when you are climbing up a rope whose strands are breaking over the edge of a precipice? You climb--that is all.

The P. P’s shot at Germans. After a night without sleep, after a day among their dead and wounded, after the torrents of shell-fire, after breathing smoke, dust and gas, these veterans were in a state of exaltation entirely unconscious of dangers of their surroundings, mindless of what came next, automatically shooting to kill as they were trained to do, even as a man pulls with every ounce of strength he has in him in a close finish of a boat race.

Corporal Dover had to give up firing his machine gun at last. Wounded, he had dug it out of the earth after an explosion and set it up again. The explosion that destroyed the gun finally crushed his leg and arm. He crawled out of the _débris_ towards the support trench which had become the fire trench, only to be killed by a bullet.

The Germans got possession of a section of the P. P’s’ trench where, it is believed, no Canadians were left. But the German effort died there. It could get no farther. This was as near to Ypres as the Germans were to go in this direction. When the day’s work was done and there in sight of the field scattered with German dead, the P. P’s counted their numbers. Of the 635 men who had begun the fight at daybreak one hundred and fifty men and four officers, Niven, Papineau, Clark and Vandenberg, remained fit for duty.

Papineau is a young lawyer of Montreal, who had already won the Military Cross for bombing Germans out of a sap at St. Eloi. Vandenberg is a Dutchman--but mostly he is Vandenberg. To him the call of youth is the call to arms. He knows the roads of Europe and the roads of Chihuahua. He was at home fighting with Villa at Zacatecas and at home fighting with the P. P’s in front of Ypres.

Darkness found all the survivors among the P. P’s in the support and communication trenches. The fire trench had become an untenable dust-heap. They crept out only to bring in any wounded unable to help themselves; and wounded and rescuers were more than once hit in the process. It was too dangerous to attempt to bury the dead, who were in the fire trench. Most of them had already been buried by shells. For them and for the dead in the support trenches interred by their living comrades Niven recited such portions as he could recall of the Church of England service for the dead--recited them with a tight throat. Then the P. P’s, unbeaten, marched out, leaving the position to their relief, a battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps.

Eighteen hundred strong they had come out to France; and after they had repulsed German charges in the midst of shells that mauled their trenches at Hooge on that indescribable day of May 8th, one hundred and fifty were able to bear arms and little Lieutenant Niven, polo player and horseman, who had entered as a private, was in command. Corporal Christy, bear-hunter of the Northwest, who could “shoot the eyes off an ant,” by some miracle had escaped without a scratch. All the praise that the P. P’s, millionaire or labourer, scapegrace or respectable pillar of society, ask is that they were worthy of fighting side by side with Mr. Thomas Atkins, regular. At best one poor little finite mind only observes through a rift in the black smoke and yellow smoke of high explosives and the clouds of dust and military secrecy something of what has happened in a small section of that long line from Switzerland to the North Sea many times; and this is given here.

Leaning against the wall in a corner of the dining-room of the French château were the P. P’s’ colours. Major Niven took off the wrapper in order that I might see the flag with the initials of the battalion which Princess Patricia embroidered with her own hands. There’s room, one repeats, for a little sentiment and a little emotion, too, between Halifax and Vancouver.

“Of course we could not take our colours into action,” said Niven. “They would have been torn into tatters or buried in a shell crater. But we’ve always kept them up at battalion headquarters. I believe we are the only battalion that has. We promised the Princess that we would.”

In her honour an old custom has been renewed in France: knights are fighting in the name of a fair lady.

XXVI

FINDING THE BRITISH FLEET

The Briton’s island instinct--Secrecy surrounding the fleet--The
magic message--The journey--A night drive along the bleak coast
of Scotland--Boy scouts as sentries--An obdurate guard--The
navy yard--The Admiral’s “quarter deck”--The largest contract
in all England--Great dry docks--Patriots in workmen’s clothes.

The Briton’s national self-consciousness is surrounded by salt water. His island instinct is only another word for sea instinct. Ebb and flow of war on the Continent, play of party politics at home, optimism and pessimism wrestling in the press--in the back of his head he was thinking of the navy.

During the first year of the war all other curtains of military secrecy were parted at intervals; but the world of British naval operations seemed hermetically sealed. One could only imagine what the Grand Fleet was like. He had despaired of ever seeing it in the life, when good fortune slipped a message across the Channel to the British front, which became the magic carpet of transition from the burrowing army in its trenches to the solid decks of battleships; which changed the war correspondent’s modern steed, the automobile, trailing dust over French roads, to destroyers trailing foam in choppy seas off English coasts.

But not all the journeying was on destroyers. One must travel by car also if he would know something of the intricate, busy world of the Admiralty’s work, which makes coastguards a part of its personnel. There was more than ships to see; more than one place to go in that wonderful week.

The transition is less sudden if we begin with the career of an open car along the coast of Scotland in the night. Dusk had fallen on the purple cloud-lands of heather dotted with the white spots of grazing sheep in the Scotch highlands under changing skies, with headlands stretching out into the misty reaches of the North Sea, forbidding in the chill air after the warmth of France and suggestive of the uninviting theatre where, in approaching winter, patrols and trawlers and mine-sweepers carried on their work to within range of the guns of Heligoland. A people who lived in such a chill land, in sight of such a chill sea, and who spoke of their “bonnie Scotland forever,” were worthy to be masters of that sea.

The Americans who think of Britain as a small island forget the distance from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s, which represents coast line to be guarded; and we may find a lesson, too, we who must make our real defence by sea, of tireless vigils which may be our own if the old Armageddon beast ever comes threatening the far-longer coast line that we have to defend. For you may never know what war is till war comes. Not even the Germans knew, though they had practised with a lifelike dummy behind the curtains for forty years.

At intervals, just as in the military zone in France, sentries stopped us and took the number of our car; but this time sentries, who were guarding a navy’s rather than an army’s secrets. With darkness we passed the light of an occasional inn, while cottage lights made a scattered sprinkling among the dim masses of the hills. One wondered where all the kilted Highland soldiers whom he had seen at the front came from, without, I trust, disclosing any military secret that the canny Highlanders enlist Lowlanders in kilty regiments.

The Frenchmen of our party--M. Stephen Pichon, former Foreign Minister, M. Réné Bazin, of the Academie Française, M. Joseph Reinach, of the _Figaro_, M. Pierre Mille, of _Le Temps_, and M. Henri Ponsot-- who had never been in Scotland before, were on the lookout for a civilian Scot in kilts and were grievously disappointed not to find a single one.

That night ride convinced me that however many Germans might be moving about in England under the guise of cockney or of Lancashire dialects in quest of information, none has any chance in Scotland. He could never get the burr, I am sure, unless born in Scotland; and if he were, once he had it the triumph ought to make him a Scotchman at heart.

The officer of the Royal Navy, who was in the car with me, confessed to less faith in his symbol of authority than in the generations’-bred burr of our chauffeur to carry conviction of our genuineness; so arguments were left to him and successfully, including two or three with Scotch cattle, which seemed to be co-operating with the sentries to block the road.

After an hour’s run inland and the car rose over a ridge and descended on a sharp grade, in the distance under the moonlight we saw the floor of the sea again, melting into opaqueness, with curving fringes of foam along the irregular shore cut by the indentations of the firths. Now the sentries were more frequent and more particular. Our single light gave dim form to the figures of sailors, soldiers, and boy scouts on patrol.

“They’ve done remarkably well, these boys!” said the officer. “Our fears that, boylike, they would see all kinds of things which didn’t exist were quite needless. The work has taught them a sense of responsibility which will remain with them after the war, when their experience will be a precious memory. They realise that it isn’t play, but a serious business, and act accordingly.”

With all the houses and the countryside dark, the rays of our lamp seemed an invading comet to the men who held up lanterns with red twinkles of warning.

“The patrol boats have complained about your lights, sir!” said one obdurate sentry.

We looked out into the black wall in the direction of the sea and could see no sign of a patrol boat. How had it been able to inform this lone sentry of that flying ray which disclosed the line of a coastal road to any one at sea? He would not accept the best argumentative burr that our chauffeur might produce as sufficient explanation or guarantee. Most Scottish of Scots in physiognomy and shrewd matter-of-factness, as revealed in the glare of the lantern, he might have been on watch in the Highland fastnesses in Prince Charlie’s time.

“Captain R----, of the Royal Navy!” explained the officer, introducing himself.

“I’ll take your name and address!” said the sentry.

“The Admiralty. I take the responsibility.”

“As I’ll report, sir!” said the sentry, not so convinced but he burred something further into the chauffeur’s ear.

This seems to have little to do with the navy, but it has much, indeed, as a part of an unfathomable, complicated business of guards within guards, intelligence battling with intelligence, deceiving raiders by land or sea, of those responsible for the safety of England and the mastery of the seas.

* * * * *

It is from the navy yard that the ships go forth to battle and to the navy yard they must return for supplies and for the grooming beat of hammers in the dry dock. Those who work at a navy yard keep the navy’s house; welcome home all the family, from Dreadnoughts to trawlers, give them cheer and shelter, and bind up their wounds.

The quarter-deck of action for Admiral Lowry, commanding the great base on the Forth, which was begun before the war and hastened to completion since, was a substantial brick office building. Adjoining his office, where he worked with engineers’ blue prints as well as with sea maps, he had fitted up a small bedroom where he slept, to be at hand if any emergency arose.

Partly we walked, as he showed us over his domain of steam-shovels, machine shops, cement factories, of building and repairs, of coaling and docking, and partly we rode on a car that ran over temporary rails laid for trucks loaded with rocks and dirt. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, a river bottom had been filled in back of the quays with material that had been excavated to form a vast basin with cement walls, where squadrons of Dreadnoughts might rest and await their turn to be warped into the great dry docks which open off it in chasmlike galleries.

“The largest contract in all England,” said the contractor. “And here is the man who checks up my work,” he added, nodding to the lean, Scotch naval civil engineer who was with us. It was clear from his look that only material of the best quality and work that was true would be acceptable to this canny mentor of efficiency.

“And the workers? Have you had any strikes here?”

“No. We have employed double the usual number of men from the start of the war,” he said. “I’m afraid that the Welsh coal troubles have been accepted as characteristic. Our men have been reasonable and patriotic. They’ve shown the right spirit. If they hadn’t, how could we have accomplished that?”

We were looking down into the depths of a dry dock blasted out of the rock, which had been begun and completed within the year. And we had heard nothing of all this through those twelve months! No writer, no photographer, chronicled this silent labour! Double lines of guards surrounded the place day and night. Only tried patriots might enter this world of a busy army in smudged workmen’s clothes, bending to their tasks with that ordered discipline of industrialism which wears no uniforms, marches without beat of drums, and toils that the ships shall want nothing to ensure victory.

XXVII

ON A DESTROYER

Losing one’s heart to the British navy--“Specialised in torpedo
work”--Watching for submarines--Passing a flotilla--The eyes
of the navy--Cold on the bridge--A jumpy sea--Look out for
the spray--A symphony in mechanism--Around a bend and: the sea
power of England!

Now we were on our way to the great thing--to our look behind the curtain at the hidden hosts of sea-power. Of some eight hundred tons’ burden our steed, doing eighteen knots, which was a dog-trot for one of her speed.

“A destroyer is like an automobile,” said the commander. “If you rush her all the time she wears out. We give her the limit only when necessary.”

On the bridge the zest of travel on a dolphin of steel held the bridle on eagerness to reach the journey’s end. We all like to see things well done and here one had his first taste of how well things are done in the British navy, which did not have to make ready for war after the war began. With an open eye one went, and the experience of other navies as a balance for his observation; but one lost one’s heart to the British navy and might as well confess it now. A six months’ cruise with our own battleship fleet was a proper introduction to the experience. Never under any flag not my own did I feel so much at home.

After the arduous monotony of the trenches and after the traffic of London, it was freedom and sport and ecstasy to be there, with the rush of salt air on the face! Our commander was under thirty years of age; and that destroyer responded to his will like a stringed instrument. He seemed a part of her, her nerves welded to his.

“Specialised in torpedo work,” he said, in answer to a question. That is the way of the British navy: to learn one thing well before you go on with another. If in the course of it you learn how to command, larger responsibilities await you. If not--there’s retired pay.

Inside a shield which sheltered them from the spray on the forward deck, significantly free of everything but that four-inch gun, its crew was stationed. The commander had only to lean over and speak through a tube and give a range, and the music began. That tube bifurcated at the end to an ear-mask over a youngster’s head; a youngster who had real sailor’s smiling blue eyes, like the commander’s own. For hours he would sit waiting in the hope that game would be sighted. No fisherman could be more patient or more cheerful.

“Before he came into the navy he was a chauffeur. He likes this,” said the commander.

“In case of a submarine you do not want to lose any time; is that it?”

“Yes,” he replied. “You never can tell when we might have a chance to put a shot into Fritz’s periscope or ram him--Fritz is our name for submarines.”

Were all the commanders of destroyers up to his mark, one wondered. How many more had the British navy caught young and trained to such quickness of decision and in the art of imparting it to his men?

Three hundred revolutions! The destroyer changed speed. Five hundred! She changed speed again.

Out of the mist in the distance flashed a white ribbon knot that seemed to be tied to a destroyer’s bow and behind it another destroyer, and still others, lean, catlike, but running as if legless, with greased bodies sliding over the sea. We snapped out some message to them and they answered as passing birds on the wing before they swept out of sight behind a headland with uncanny ease of speed. How many destroyers had England running to and fro in the North Sea, keen for the chase and too quick at dodging and too fast to be in any danger of the under-water dagger thrust of the assassins whom they sought. We know the figures in the naval lists, but there cannot be too many. They are the eyes of the navy; they gather information and carry a sting in their torpedo tubes.

It was chilly there on the bridge, with the prospect too entrancing not to remain even if one froze. But here stepped in naval preparedness with thick, short coats of llama wool.

“Served out to all the men last winter, when we were in the thick of it patrolling,” the commander explained. “You’ll not get cold in that!”

“And yourself?” was suggested to the commander.

“Oh, it is not cold enough for that in September! We’re hardened to it. You come from the land and feel the change of air; we are at sea all the time,” he replied. He was without even an overcoat; and the ease with which he held his footing made land lubbers feel their awkwardness.

A jumpy, uncertain tidal sea was running. Yet our destroyer glided over the waves, cut through them, played with them, and let them seem to play with her, all the while laughing at them with the power of the purring vitals that drove her steadily on.

“Look out!” which at the front in France was a signal to jump for a “funk pit.” We ducked, as a cloud of spray passed above the heavy canvas and clattered like hail against the smokestack. “There won’t be any more!” said the commander. He was right. He knew that passage. One wondered if he did not know every gallon of water in the North Sea, which he had experienced in all its moods.